Care must be taken when removing and carrying an injured person to a location equipped to administer medical treatment. Moving the injured person requires extreme caution whenever moving the body could cause further injury. Hastily removing an individual from the site of an accident and transporting them to a medical center might cause injuries beyond those suffered in the actual accident. This is particularly true in the case of back and/or neck injuries. Thus, if the patient has had an injury to the spine, it is of the utmost importance to immobilize the body during the handling of the patient. This need is recognized, and, to some extent, all litters and stretchers are designed with an eye toward maintaining the patient in an immobile as well as comfortable position.
The problems associated with moving an injured individual are exacerbated when it is difficult to access the injured individual, as, for example, in the case of a car accident in which the structure of the car has been compromised. The present inventor's prior U.S. Pat. No. 4,211,218 provides a spinal restraint device that has been well received because it provides a device that can be employed in location where injured individual is fairly inaccessible. While this device is well received, certain aspects of its structure make the device difficult to use with certain people and in certain situations, and it has been found that specific structural features of known spinal restraint devices can be altered to improve performance and usefulness. Thus, this invention provides a spinal restraint device improving upon those structures of the prior art.